Marketing cities: place branding in perspective, 4-6 December 2008, Berlin City Hall

Marketing cities: place branding in perspective, 4-6 December 2008, Berlin City Hall

Article Type: Conference report From: Journal of Place Management and Development, Volume 2, Issue 1

The rapid growth of city branding – and more widely place branding – in recent years was the impetus for the organisation of this conference, which took place in Berlin in the first week of December 2008. The conference was organised by INPOLIS UCE GmBH, in partnership with the Association for Place Branding and Public Diplomacy, and the Georg Simmel Center for Metropolitan Studies at the Humboldt University in Berlin. The setting could not have been more appropriate: the red brick Stalinist inspired Rotes Rathaus situated on one side of the huge Alexanderplatz, the heart of the former East Berlin, dominated by its 365 m high television tower, an iconic symbol for both the old and the new city.

The event attracted about 115 delegates, mainly from across Europe, but with some representatives from the USA and Mexico. As well as an eclectic mix of nationalities, the attendees had professional academic and practitioner backgrounds in marketing, geography, urban policy, design and regeneration. Altogether about 40 papers were presented, selected from over 80 submitted to the organisers. For the most part they were organised into two parallel streams, but interspersed with several keynote addresses and panel forums. The morning of Saturday, December 6th, saw an interesting 3 h excursion around Berlin, focusing on a number of urban development projects within the city.

The branding and re-branding of Berlin itself was the apposite theme for both the starting and closing sessions of the conference, and provided a common point of reference for delegates. The background and planning of the current BeBerlin campaign was introduced by Björn Böhning, a member of the policy planning staff of the Berlin major. The campaign is a bottom-up attempt to involve Berliners in the marketing of their city, where the core aim is get citizens to see their place as a unified whole, rather than an attempt to communicate with an external audience. A slight concern that this presentation might herald an uninterrupted 48 h sequence of best-practice success stories was quickly allayed in the following panel discussion, where a critical element was introduced, not least by Claire Columb (Bartlett School of Planning, UCL) who has made a major study of the politics of urban development, planning and city marketing in Berlin since Unification. In the course of this lively forum, a number of issues about city branding in general were first raised, continued to be debated over the Bavarian dinner that followed, and were to appear as a leitmotif throughout the subsequent two days.

An 8 h substantive programme of paper presentations got underway at 9 am on Friday, 5th, running in two parallel streams. The session titles included “Strategies and Method”, “Culture/industry”, “Creative Cities/Urban Design”, and “Tourism Destinations” and about 30 min were allocated for each author, providing good time for discussing specific points. The Saturday afternoon saw another 4 h of presentations, some continuing the earlier themes, and one new one on “Cities between the local and the global”. Within each session there was usually a mix of papers by academic, practitioners and consultants, and, what seems inevitable at this stage of place branding research, a wide range of individual case studies were presented. Hence, amongst others, the audience learnt about branding and marketing in cities as diverse as Milan, Sante Fe, Linz, Liverpool, Malmö, Rostock, Istanbul and Bremen. In fact, a few papers covered areas wider than cities, with examples of regional place marketing in Italy and Germany, for instance, and of even (small) countries in the Caribbean. However, this simply underlined the view that many issues of place branding are broadly similar, and independent of scale. A number of the case studies were used to demonstrate methodological approaches to place branding and marketing that the authors considered could be applied elsewhere. These included theoretical contributions to the nature of the place product as well as, for example, techniques for segmenting target audiences, and developing slogans and logos. Others were concerned with urban design issues, such as a presentation on the contribution original street furniture can make to developing a unique place identity, complementing another paper on the importance of flagship buildings.

All of the above was interesting in its own right, and, piece by piece, a dynamic picture of place branding activity was built up. Where the conference really came alive, however, was in the critical issues that were raised in a few of the papers, and all of the discussions, about the exact nature, role and value of city/place branding. Two papers stand out in leading the questioning here. The first was the keynote address by Professor Greg Ashworth on “Can we, do we, should we, brand places?”; and the second, a paper by Martin Boisen on “Cities are not products, so stop trying to sell them as such”. As their titles suggest, these, and other contributions, started an almost parallel debate on whether city (place) branding had any substantive intellectual or practical justification. That numerous places now attempt to brand themselves might be taken not so much as an endorsement of its effectiveness, it can be argued, but as a measure of the success of specialist consultancies in persuading place managers that they need to do it – essentially because everyone else is, and the risk of being left out is not one to be taken lightly. However, the consequence has been that cities emphasise a small number of attributes in their promotional messages – few are not “creative”, “innovative” or “accessible” – and that rather than differentiation, the irony is that we have seen an increasing homogenisation of places in our globalised world. This extends down to slogans and logos: the BeBerliner campaign echoing a similar one in Belfast, and reminiscent too of the I AMsterdam strapline.

Rather then just illuminating best practice, the conference really laid the basis for deeper considerations of place branding. The need for a common language between the various groups involved in the activity was raised, as was the requirement to develop a better theoretical understanding of the activity. The absence of virtually any reference to mainstream branding literature was one symptom of the need to build inter-disciplinary connections between management/marketing, and urban planning and regeneration research. The complex, multi-attribute and nested nature of place poses another set of challenges to developing coherent place branding strategies, especially within the limited budgets that are available, and the multiple and fragmented nature of the audiences that are the target.

All in all, therefore, this was a stimulating and efficiently run conference, for which the organisers are to be warmly thanked. Whether it marks the beginning of much greater academic and practitioner activity in this area remains to be seen. Will another conference in, say, two years, be essentially just a repeat of what went on here, or will some significant progress have been made in developing research and practice? Will failures be as well described as the successes? I am not convinced there is yet a critical mass of people with a commonly shared understanding for this to happen. People will need to emerge from their silos, but where there’s a will, there’s always a way, and maybe, just maybe, this event will prove the starting point for this to happen.

David BennisonManchester Metropolitan University Business School, Manchester, UK